School systems are shifting towards forms of post-bureaucratic governance (PBG), implying higher levels of school autonomy, choice, and performance-based management. Under this governance approach, which combines forms of administrative and market accountability, schools face greater levels of competition and external pressure to perform. Schools…

Academic governance and leadership are two inter-related concepts that set the tone and direction for the development of higher education at the system as well as institutional levels. This article examines the academic governance and leadership in Malaysian higher education by focusing on two national higher education strategic initiatives: the…

Green sheds light onto the mercurial and ill-defined boundaries of institutional governance within China's unique system of higher education, a national system that remains misunderstood by scholars who continue to position it as little more than a research arm of the party/state. Through a synthesis of systems theory, complexity theory, and…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…

The education system in England, along with the leadership and management of its schools, has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years, heavily influenced by key features of the private school sector. However, in this article, it is argued that the strong policy focus on autonomy and diversity was in fact an accentuation of the historical…

This paper analyses, from the perspective of the political sociology of policy instruments, the adoption and re-contextualisation of School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) reforms in Spain, with a particular focus on the region of Madrid. Over the last few decades, Madrid has adopted a wide range of education policies that have contributed to…

The paper critically discusses how the notion of autonomy is textually constructed in the neo-liberal discourses of a corporatised public South African higher education system. By employing the methods of critical discourse analysis (CDA), I analyse two selected texts written by various leaders connected to the University of Johannesburg between…

This contribution focuses on quality assurance (QA) agencies in the sphere of higher education. It develops a theoretical framework that interrelates systems theory with Gramsci's theory of hegemony with a view to situating this new control of universities in the broader context of a further differentiation of society and emerging heterarchical…

The modern university and the academic profession itself are facing new challenges: First, the increasing complexity of labor markets and globalization are undermining the structure of the academic profession, and secondly, the rise in cost of university research calls into question the autonomy of the university. The internationalization of the…

Since the launch of the Lisbon Agenda, European higher education systems have gravitated towards a common policy blueprint for governance that concentrates power in the hands of executive authorities and increases accountability to external stakeholders. The Polish system remains an outlier, providing an informative case study of a clash between…

In England the balance of responsibilities between national and local government for the governance of education is changing. Relationships between schools are shifting and new structures, groups and alliances are being created in response to national policy. The article is part of a project to understand how the new local education landscapes are…

This paper describes the current state of governance and reforms of Indonesia's higher education system. It seeks to identify the impact of and the constraints on the national higher education reform agenda with respect to institutional autonomy for public universities. Under the prevailing government regulations, 11 public universities have been…

We examine how discourses of leadership and responsibilisation are used in contemporary universities to deepen neoliberal administration and further the corporate university's business plan by restructuring and redescribing academic work. Strategically, responsibilisation discourse, promoted as "distributed leadership", is a technology…

This Policy Paper aims at analysing the most important aspects of Public Responsibility, Financing and Governance of Higher Educations while seeking to formulate a students perspective on the state of play within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). In doing so it touches upon the very foundation of how and in which socio-political…

Colleges and universities exist within a political arena where external demands for accountability materialize within a market-driven environment. As a result, government agencies pressure colleges and universities to rely on assessment and transparent reporting to become more market-driven assuming that the competition within the market, led by…